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John Burns on Ahmed Wali Karzai and the C.I.A.

By John F. Burns October 30, 2009 8:54 pmOctober 30, 2009 8:54 pm

John Burns, the chief foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is answering questions about a New York Times article about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai, who is accused of having ties to the nation’s opium trade, has been on the C.I.A. payroll since 2001, according to the article.

Banaras Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAhmed Wali Karzai, right, the brother of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, at a campaign event in Kandahar in August.

For those charged with finding a path for America through the political and military minefield of Afghanistan, it has been a tough week –- and the Times’ front-page story of Oct. 28 on the C.I.A. links of Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother and a man long linked to the country’s opium trade, has been only part of it. The burden of the momentous decisions on war strategy that will have to be made in the next few weeks was powerfully transmitted by President Obama’s visit in the early hours of Thursday to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and by the photographs of the president saluting at the cargo bay door of a C-17 cargo plane as a military honor party carried the flag-draped casket of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., to a waiting hearse.
The aircraft brought home the bodies of 15 servicemen and three Drug Enforcement Agency officials who were killed on operations in southwest Afghanistan within the 24-hour period from Tuesday to Wednesday -– a toll that contributed to making October, with at least 56 Americans killed, the war’s worst month yet, in terms of Americans lost. Casualties on that scale have brought the Afghan conflict, for the United States, ever closer to the terrible price paid in Iraq. And whatever political calculations there may have been in the White House in having the president at Dover to talk to the families of the fallen and join prayers over the caskets in the aircraft’s cargo bay –- and it was as graphic a demonstration as there could be of the weight of the decisions he has to make –- nobody who has seen any part of the mournful journey America’s fallen make on their way home from distant battlefields can doubt that it will have made a profound impression on the president. There is nothing to compare with that experience, in terms of appreciating the full cost of America’s wars, and it is surely right that Mr. Obama would want to take the full measure of the price American servicemen and women are being asked to pay as he weighs the country’s forward course in Afghanistan.

That, readers may think, is a long way from the topic we’ve posed on this blog this week, the Times’ article about the C.I.A. links of Ahmed Wali Karzai, who has spent much of the past eight years on the agency’s payroll, according to the reporting of Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, and that at a time when he has been insistently accused of using his position as the most powerful government official in southern Afghanistan to profit from narcotics trafficking (an allegation he and his brother, the president, have just as insistently denied). But as the responses on this blog in the past 48 hours have shown, the nature of the allies America has made in Afghanistan, the brothers Karzai principal among them, factors crucially into the question of how much deeper, if at all, the United States should become vested in the Afghan conflict.

If there is one theme that emerges stronger than any other from readers’ comments, it is the belief — the fear — that America has made allies of men so deeply corrupted, and so far beyond hope of gaining the trust and support of their 30 million fellow citizens, that no new troop increases, and no new military strategy on the part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, has any prospect of success as long as we are caught in this morbid embrace. “This would be comical if it were not so tragic,” writes Norman Markowitz, in one of many similar comments. “This is further evidence that we should be preparing to pull ourselves out of the ‘Afghan trap’ before it is too late.” Eric, in another contribution, expresses a similar view. “If we had to do it all over again, wouldn’t we be better off if we never invaded Afghanistan or Iraq?”

Implicit in Eric’s comment is the heart of the problem facing those now wrestling in Washington with the choices to be made on military and political strategy. Whatever differences of view there may be retrospectively about the decision President Bush made in 2001 to use military force to rid Afghanistan of the country’s Taliban rulers and their Al Qaeda allies (and there were few in either major party in the wake of 9/11 who dissented, at least then), the people now gathered around the table in the White House are faced with “facts on the ground,” after eight years of war, that impel them, I think many Americans would agree, to find solutions that do not simply involve a peremptory abandonment of the country to the chaos that would ensue if western military support were withdrawn. Almost certainly, that would lead, and rapidly, to a new takeover by the Taliban; and it would stretch credulity to believe Mullah Mohammed Omar’s assurances that the Taliban rulers would not again allow America’s Al Qaeda enemies to use the country as a sanctuary for new attacks on the West. For one thing, there is little reason to believe that the diehards associated with the Taliban leader in the Quetta Shura would stick by his promises; for another, there is scant prospect that they could enforce a policy that denied sanctuary to Al Qaeda, even if they chose.

For all that, few can believe that there can be any good outcome for America in Afghanistan unless ways are found to give the country a government, and leaders, with some prospect of rallying the kind of popular support President Karzai currently lacks. It is virtually certain that Mr. Karzai will be re-elected in next week’s run-off election, and just about as certain that the run-off will attract the same widespread allegations of ballot fraud as the first round in August. That will mean that the western allies will have to deal with Mr. Karzai for another four years, like it or not, barring unforeseen events, such as an enforced end to Mr. Karzai’s new tenure. Several of our readers posted comments that reach back to Vietnam for an example of another war in which America was wedded to a corrupt and incompetent president, but one element in that analogy that does not carry over is the way in which the dilemma was solved. A few weeks before President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, a C.I.A.-backed coup in Saigon , running to an extreme that the C.I.A. claimed not to have intended, ended with the then-president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, being assassinated with his brother in the rear of an armored personnel carrier outside the presidential palace. Options of that kind, thankfully, have long been off the table. More likely, the best that can be hoped — and recent Times reports from Washington indicate that the White House will make this a pillar of its new policy — is that Mr. Karzai will be held by the western allies, henceforth, to far stricter performance standards; and that part of that will entail ridding his government of the most egregious practitioners of corruption and incompetence. Ahmed Wali Karzai, surely, will be high on that list.

Another point that emerges from the comments that have flowed in on this subject is that America has a bleak record, going back to the Soviet invasion in 1979, of choosing dubious allies in Afghanistan. Norman Markowitz writes that the C.I.A, under President Reagan in the 1980’s, adopted in Afghanistan the approach it had followed for many years in other poor countries, funding “all kinds of military and political leaders who would do its bidding with no interest in what their policies meant to the people in those countries.” Wahed, an Afghan from Kandahar, says in another comment, again referring to the mujahideen allies backed by the C.I.A. during the years when it was funneling billions of dollars into the insurgent struggle to rid Afghanistan of its Soviet occupiers — backing the men who rose to power in Kabul after the collapse of the Najibullah government the Soviets left behind when they withdrew in 1989 — that “we allied ourselves with such notorious thugs that their atrocities and misrule helped Taliban to come to power in the first place.” Another contributor, David, writing as I guess from the United States, recalls attending a recent speech by a young Afghan woman named Zoya, in which she spoke of the U.S. military’s “preference for working with the warlords, whom she rightly identified as mass-murderers, torturers, and equal to the Taliban from the perspective of citizens like her.”

It is an indictment that carries a good measure of weight with anybody who has had personal experience of Afghanistan in the past 30 years. The story of the 1980s and 1990s is too well rehearsed to bear repeating, but you did not have to be communist fellow-traveler — and I was not, having reported for the Times from Moscow in the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko years, the period of the Soviet military build-up in Afghanistan — to conclude that the mujahideen leaders we chose to arm and finance were in many ways as reprehensible as the puppet leaders installed in Kabul by the Kremlin, in some ways more so. The mujahideen leader who stood head and shoulders above the others, by his moral disposition as well as his military prowess, was the Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Lion of the Panjshir,” who was largely overlooked by the C.I.A. and its Pakistani agent, the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which channelled most of the $10-bllion in aid that flowed to the insurgents. The most favored of the ISI’s clients was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a murderous thug who cut his political teeth in the pre-Soviet period, so many Afghans said, by throwing acid in the face of women on the Kabul university campus who left their heads uncovered. Later, in the early 1990s, Mr. Hekmatyar served briefly as prime minister in Kabul, before quitting the government and ordering his forces, using weapons originally supplied to them by the ISI, to reduce much of Kabul to rubble. At a news conference in Kabul one day, I asked him if the acid-throwing stories were true. He stopped me afterward as I headed for the door. “You want to know if I am a murderer,” he said, inviting me for a cup of green tea. I did, and recall with a chill, even now, how he sat across the table from me, jocular, as he assured me of his uncompromised civility. Now, he is back in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, an ally of the extremist Taliban, and still sowing terror. It would be instructive to learn from the Americans who thought him a worthy ally in the 1980s what they make of him now.

Why are there no comments on the obvious, but perhaps unprovable, connection between the beneficial relationship that exists between the CIA and the black market profits from the drug trade? It must be on everybody’s mind.

What would have really really surprised me is if it was disclosed that Mr.Vali Karzai was not on CIA (or any other US Agency) payroll.

What does surprise me is the NYTs’ willingness to be a tool for one side or the other side, while consistently ignoring or failing to grasp the stakes involved.

The NYT first story on Mr.Vali Karzai, much trumpeted at the time, accusing him of being a drug smuggler was as full of holes as the Iraq WMD stories of yester-years. That was one story that spoon fed by Pakistani Intelligence and Military establishment figures. (For those are not upto speed, the Pakistani Natl Sec apparatus hates Karzai brothers). Additionally, the timing of that story was nicely dovetailed with push by some in the Washington to rid of Karizai the President. It is inconceivable that the team involved (NYT reporters, editors) did not realize this game plan. While the drug story has been sited numerously by a range of organizations, there has not been one original reporting to back up the first one.

It would not surprise me at all if the same set of people leaked both the stories, for that one reason.

I wish, some of the times, the NYT team of crack reporters would report on WHY some of the leaks and news tips are being offered to them for WHAT end.

I feel it is America fighting a war against itself. There is one America which wants peace, stability and progress, and there is another America which wants to create conflicts and then prolong them. There is one America which talks freedom, human rights and another America which overthrows democracies and supports dictators. To me America presents a deceitful scene, a difficult scene and a scenario that is difficult to comprehend. I still am not able to understand what is America digging in Afghanistan; gold, oil, opium, hash, drugs or human rights. Looks like the whole of US has become mortally dependent on drugs from the Latin America, Laos, Vietmam, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan and that is the beginning and the end of conflict. And this conlict has been bringing untold misery the the entire globe. I fear the present US may not last to see the end of the conflict, despite their best intentions.

The sad thing is that even after the fall of Soviet Union was becoming apparent we still refused to back the Najibullah government. He never really was a communist, only a Soviet puppet. He was accused of communism by his political enemies because in Afghanistan it is equated to atheism.

the swamp will be big and deep enough to bury all those (american) intentions for once and for all. if obama is so naive that he’ll be able to fix what nobody ever could fix anytime, he’ll lose (everything). this won’t go down easy. pack your things and go. whatdoyewant from this hellhole?
a democratic showcase.? hahahahahahah

The article is politically correct, and hence satisfies the only remaining standard of journalism at the NYT, as it slides into insolvency. The reporter is as much an “Ugly American” as the naive character in Green’s novel filled with western ideology and lacking any genuine understanding of Afghanistan, its people or its culture.

Josef Stalin was a far worse human being than the Karzais, and the government he presided over was infinitely worse than Afghanistan’s government today. Should we have refused to extend military and economic aid to Russia during WWII on those grounds? Or refused to invade Europe to avoid helping the Soviet criminals?

In life, let alone politics, you have to deal with reality. Corruption is a fact of human nature and exists all over the world, including our own country. If we were to seek out only clean allies, we would have no friends. If, as I believe, we should help the Afghan government and people resist the Taliban, it would be madness to condition our support on “ending corruption.” Will the critics suggest a viable alternative to Ahmed Karzai, please?

Afghanistan has suffered 30 years of all-consuming war, with a million dead and millions more permanently driven from their homes. No institution was left intact, least of all government.

The country and government will revive, if given a chance; such is human resilience. But don’t expect a corruption-free government in that region. What model should they follow? Pakistan? Uzbekistan? France perhaps (viz. current trials)? Or perhaps Illinois? We’ll send a panel of the last three governors of Illinois to advise Karzai, governor of Kandahar. I’m sure they can be given time off if Pres. Obama requests it, as long as they wear their electronic bracelets and report to their parole officers weekly.

As far as opium policy: the US has thankfully abandoned the policy of eradication, which brought far more harm than benefit.

The worldwide opium industry made Afghanistan its primary source of raw material during the Taliban era. For the foreseeable future, that will not change, whatever the progress of the war. This is another diversion that should not constrain US choices.

A stable government might be able to chip away at opium dominance. For now, the trade provides employment for hundreds of thousands of Afghans and brings much-needed export dollars to the country, even if the bulk of the profits go to evil international mafias and a big chunk goes to finance brutal fanatics.

No matter how the US articulates its Afghanistan policy, there will be those in the region, the world, as the US, who will try to undermine it. A coherent administration that knows what it is doing should not worry about trying to satisfy naive or disingenuous critics who focus on “corruption.” They will never be satisfied.

“Good governance” is a lovely slogan, and it surely should be one goal of our mission. But in the end, we can do only so much to shape Afghanistan’s government. What we CAN do is help them prevent a Taliban takeover. I believe that. The Bush administration believed that, and the Obama administration apparently believes it too. Those who agree should not be diverted by side issues.

Demand and supply!
First role of drug trafficking is to supply commodities where demand & profit is high.
Second responsibility to keep businesses flourishing and continue, it is essential to include high power corrupt official.
As long we in USA and Europe keep using drugs, supply will not stop. Some time from South America and other time from east. The sad part is, different government agencies directly or indirectly involve in illegal deals to achieve our foreign policy goal.
During early invasion of Afghanistan multiple statistical data from NY time shows opium cultivation was increase several time. This is true that drug dealers were against Taliban because they were having trouble in keeping their business. To control one criminal (Taliban) in southern Afghanistan we compromise and shake hand with other criminals (Drug dealers).
This game will continue until and unless we stop using drugs and change our foreign policy.
How China did to achieve drug free country? 1st eliminate all corrupt officials. We have to clean our house first. We should not just blame Karzai or his brother. We play wrong foreign policy to make friends like Ferdinand Marcos in Philippines. Shah in Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua. Sadam Husain in Iraq or Osama Bin Laden in USSR invasion of Afghanistan. Some how our CIA always pick the most criminal mind individuals to achieve our foreign policy goal.
And this is another good example of our failed foreign policy

In reference the ParagAdalja’s comment, what I would really like to see is some better investigative stories on the ISI and their role in the perpetuation of the mess in Afghanistan. The ISI has been the problem since the 80’s. The ISI is the one who created most of and has funded all of those groups we refer to as terrorists. The ISI is the Islamic worlds most successful secret agency as shown by its ability to steal sufficient nuclear secrets and technology to supply its country with a nuclear weapon. The ISI has been shown to be behind most of the political manipulation in Afghanistan and is still the single biggest instigator of violence in the region. They’re so good they have the CIA wrapped up tight thinking they are our allies. The ISI is problem.

There is no connection between 9/11 and Afghanistan that is not completely overmatched by the connection between 9/11 and Saudi Arabia. The hijackers did not train in Afghanistan, they trained in the USA! Just say “Oops!” and get out of there.

Where is Mother Teresa when you need her? Have you traveled to the countries we’re talking about? There are no innocent males in Afghanistan and good luck finding someone that mirrors American values.

Americans (CIA, DoD, State, AID, etc) all need to make compromises when choosing partners to work with overseas. If we avoided working with anyone who has come into contact with the opium trade in Afghanistan, we would literally have no one to work with us.

Oh wait, that’s what happened after former Sen. Torricelli prohibited the US in the mid-90s from working with those associated with terrorism and other criminal groups. Can’t monitor whom you can’t speak with and it contributes to 9-11. Around and around we go.

The real question is why we think we can bring democracy to a country of individual tribes who have little/no interest in a shared form of government.

Having spent much time in Pakistan and the place we currently call Afghanistan … and, having written books about these places, let me say that like the Russians before us (and the British) we are about to run out of money to have any “forward” policy whatsoever in these places.

Partcularly stark for America this week must have been Ms. Clinton’s rousing welcome in Pakistan. America is learning, albeit slowly, that both Pakistan’s troubles and the Afghan’s troubles are actually even beyond the people who live there.

India, China, Pakistan and lots of other people who live in Asia are being drowned in a tidal wave of people.

The poor people of these countries. The poor, poor people.

America will withdraw from Iraq, and Pakistan and Afghanistan for one single reason. America will not have the money to “help” Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and the US military industrial punters.

What will then happen? … a few years in the future .. is that in the places we lent a helping hand in these sad lands to the east will fall into the hands of opportunistic and bent Islamic corruptocrats … just like Iran fell to the same group three decades ago.

Isn’t economics wonderful?

People in the US are dreaming when they reference Vietnam and Afghanistan in the same sentence. 1.3 million troops supporting a war in Asia? We will never, ever be able to afford helping people like that again.

The dollar is cracking people. Unless Goldman and JP Morgan, and the health care companies and big pharma can start paying for some Blackwater cadres… the people in Pakhtunistan and Swat are out of luck.

Have a nice day John. Remember to sit on your flak jacket whenever you take a trip out of town. We don’t want to loose you in another silly war that no one will remember.

Taking a page from Business Strategy 101, first “decide What you want the end-state (of a planned action) to be”, and then “decide How to attain that end-state”. Do we support corruption and anti-democratic activities of our chosen allies, who roll over their people for personal benefit, or do we support leaders who look out for the long-term interests of their fellow citizens? And what happens if there don’t happen to be any ‘democratic’ leaders at a given moment in history?

Our problem isn’t making a decision like this – it’s the way that we let implicit assumptions guide that decision, rather than making those assumptions explicit.

Fixing our governmental decision process requires that we be able to make all assumptions and constraints explicit. That requires reforming how political campaigns are financed. Citizens in America are watching Republicans and Democrats grovel, doing their campaign funders bidding, rather than the direction of their constituents.

Creation of an anti-corruption political party, that champions and truly adheres to explicit ethical principles including anti-corruption, is probably required to cleanse the Aegean stables of modern American politics.

Easy? No, definitely not. Devil is in the details. Rascals wolves will wear anti-corruption sheeps clothing. Until we go after that decision, we’ll probably soon be saying “how did we get stuck in this mess – didn’t we learn anything from Afghanistan?”

It’s a tragedy that people are dying in Afghanistan for nothing. If the US as a democracy chooses to go to war against another country everyone should bare the burdens of that war–that means the children of congressmen should be fighting alongside the urban and rural working class kids.How long do you think the war would last if sons and daughters of the privledged started coming home in body bags?

No one has been able to decribe a “victory” in Afghanistan. Probably because no one really thinks one is available. With no national political organization in Afghanistan to take over the workings of defense or a government, how do we ever get out of there?
Our President is being pushed into a monstrous error by political pressure. We face the same fate in Afghanistan as Russia.

Yes, Americans are outraged at our government’s persistent clandestine support of corrupt foreign governments such as the Karzai regime in Afghanistan. If our government is to retain any credibility as a world power it needs to start listening to the American people for a change.

I’ve heard enough about how well-intentioned our government is. What matters is what we do – not what we say – and, so far, we have done nothing to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a narco state ruled by drug lords.

Obama has done his best to undermine the CIA and our overseas intelligence , just as Jimmy Carter did in the 1970’s .
It took a generation to regain great intelligence again , and to make this country safe from despots and tyrants throughout the world .

Recent exchange between Pakistani journalists and Secretary of State Clinton is enlightening for its frankness when she said in relation to Taliban that “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get to them if they really wanted to”. However, her response to students who were critical of American “Drone” attacks resulting in some civilian deaths as a challenge to Pakistani sovereignty, I wish she had also said that Taliban is doing violence to you and us; they are your enemy as well. We are on your side but you must help yourself by standing up to these gangsters who hide behind the camouflage of false religiosity. Direct your criticism to those who are determined to hurt you and are trying to undermine Pakistani civilian society – Al Qaida and Taliban.

all politicians world wide are immoral corrupt egomaniacs from clinton to sarkozy .
c.i.a.is a cursory curse and is a hornet’s nest which is run without any scruples .
i cannot believe that mrs.clinton has no clue as to CIA ACTIVITY ,which she proclaimed in her interview at THE GC-UNI in LAHORE ,WHILE SHE WAS BARBECUED ,thorough and proper by the students who seemed more suave politicallty than her.
in that context KARZAI-,ZARDARI ARE JUST bona fide CIA PUPPETS,WHICH IS WIDELY ACKNOWLEDGED -so why is NYT making a big deal of this now -anyone smell a dead rat .

I read in some UN documentation if i remember correctly that Afghanistan and many other countries around the world are legally allowed to grow opium (quotas) for the medical industry. I have no idea how this would impact the current allegations but as I have followed US foreign policy for the last thirty years this story is just part and parcel of how America operates accusing itself and allies of being corrupt from El Salvador to Afghanistan the US has never been able to involve itself in a noble cause without attempting to destroy itself. Even in Mexico today there are plenty of allegations that the guns for the cartels come from the US. If the President wants to replace Karzai why not just ask him to resign? But then again I would have thought that the day after the Taliban students protested the alleged burning of a Koran the President should have appeared on Afghan TV with a Koran explaining that he had borrowed one from the Kabul Library and would return it after he had finished consulting it. A little lie which would better advance policy the area compared to trying to superimpose the Colombia model on the Afghan debate.

I have lived and served in the U.S. long enough. The act of the American People is quite contrary to the acts of the succcessive U.S. Governments. In a few words the solution would lie for the U.S. Governments to respect the interest of all other countries as they do for their own and to abide by their commitments.

The only thing holding our enemies together is the presence of the US. America made the same mistake during the Cold War, when it thought that Communism was a monolithic culture and fighting “them” in Viet Nam was equal to fighting “them” in Russia.

If we abandon Afghanistan, within minutes internecine fighting will break out between all the independant groups wanting power. Left to their own devices, the so called “Taliban” will devolve into what they are, reckless, feckless and independent groups who will Blakanize the region and reduce it to a powerless state like Somalia.

Is that a bad outcome for America? It beats the hell of of losing American lives and treasure to prop up an imaginary country that can’t hold itself together no matter what we do.

Furthermore, an Afghanistan in that condition will drive the Pakistani’s to us and enhance our ability to help the only power in the region that might be of value to us and – given thier nuclear capacity – must be stabilized.

iJarvis

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